Brother HL-2170W wireless printer

I have purchased ths product in hopes of lowering my ink bill and also the accessibility to a printer in my home. I have several pc's some xp and 1 vista. I am using the Dlink dir655 router for my network. I had some difficulty at first setting up the printer with my network using WPA2 and a key. I finally got in which I touch with Brother and they were unable to assist me and elevated me to the 2ND level tech which is supposed to call me back.Unable to tlak with Brother I called DLink and they told me that they don't advise on printer sharing. Thi is my first attempt into sharing a printer. I was going to purchase a printer and have it attached to a central computer to share it that way until I saw this one for sale.

I have gone through the setup and configuration stages for the printer. I first installed the printer drivers on my vista laptop and i can print fine off of it. Next, I installed the driver on an XP laptop. The drive installed fine but I cannot print from this computer. I can access the internet through this computer but when I print the printer never gets the information to print. The job just stays in the print cue. I figure that I don't have the network settings exactly right. Is it possible that the printer will only relate to the first computer that was set up?

On your Vista laptop (on which I assume the printer was installed first), go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Printers. Right click on the printer in question and go to "Sharing...". In the next window click on "Sharing" above and go to "Change sharing options", in the next window check the box "share this printer". This might do it.

Yes it is the Vista laptop. When I go to the printer and go to sharing, it tells me that print jobs coming from other computers have to access the printer through this(vista laptop) computer and must have a logon user for this computer, also the printer would not be available when this computer is not running. This printer is installed onto my network as an independant machine when print jobs come to it if it is sleeping it activates to do the job and then goes back to sleep automatically. I was originally going to set up a printer using the method you suggested but this sounded a little more convenient. Thanks for the help!

@whs: Those instructions are for sharing a printer connected via USB or such on a computer. The printer the poster has actually has a wireless interface so all the computers can talk to it over wireless just like a normal printer talks over a USB cable.

@teemnokayna: I'll search online for information on that printer and post back a little later if I find anything helpful.

jd, my assumption was that the printer was hardwired to the Vista PC and shared by the XP's via the router (because I think this printer has no own networking capabilities). In that case, I thought, Vista would "monpolize" the printer unless you told it to share. But maybe I took a "wrong turn" somewhere.

I finally got a call from brother, they were very helpful. It turns out that I have the free internet security suite from time warner cable CA security suite. Evidently the firewall is preventing this printer from communicating with this computer... I need to find out how to make an exception for this on that firewall.... Thanks for the help!